Silver (37 page)

27

No Safe Place Like Home

Jude Lethe watched the world unravel in glorious Technicolor over and over again. The German television cameras had captured the assassination from three different angles. It didn’t look good for Koni from any of them. Lethe froze the frame as the first glint of silver caught the low sun. It was too difficult to call where the knife had originated from. He wasn’t a body language expert. He knew where it had come from—the Swiss Guard closest to the Holy Father had been concealing it within the folds of his clownish armor—but proving it was a different thing all together.

Suddenly they were two men down, and there was nothing the old man could do. His hands were tied by the very deniability that allowed them the freedom of movement their mandate granted them. He couldn’t go to the Foreign Secretary and appeal, he couldn’t contact the British ambassador in Germany. Ogmios didn’t exist on any official charter. They had no right of recall. The embassy wasn’t going to order an extradition for Konstantin, and for the same reason they weren’t going to mount an assault to recover Orla. They were deniable. They screwed up for Queen and Country, but that didn’t matter in the slightest. They screwed up. That was what it boiled down to.

Konstantin was on camera, prime suspect in the assassination of the Pope. The BKA would want a quick result, justice seen to be served. They wouldn’t want an international incident. They wouldn’t want him being extradited to the UK to stand trial. It had happened on German soil; it would be dealt with on German soil, with Germanic efficiency. In the eyes of the world Konstantin was already guilty—they’d seen it happen. Lethe needed to find proof that they hadn’t, that their brains had connected the dots and filled in the blanks but got it all horribly wrong. And the damned cameras weren’t helping.

Neither was the fact that when they started running their background checks the first thing they’d find out about Konstantin Khavin was that he was a defector from the old Soviet Republic. Two and two would make four, or an approximation of it, and they’d leap to the only logical conclusion: that you could take Konstantin Khavin out of Mother Russia, but you couldn’t take Mother Russia and her black heart out of Konstantin Khavin. He was a spy—a deep plant—still at the beck and call of Moscow. Because no matter how enlightened everyone was now that the Wall had come down, it didn’t take a lot to reignite all of the old fears and that deep-seated distrust. It was easier for people to believe that the old enemies were still enemies than it was to turn the blame around and point the finger at people like Miles Devere, capitalists driven by plain, simple, ugly greed.

When the first gunshots sounded the crane camera, the one that would otherwise have had the perfect angle to capture the entire thing, roved wildly away from the stage toward the explosion of black feathers as the birds burst out of the trees. By the time its lens was back on the stage the murder had already unfolded and the last moments of it were playing out. Konstantin knelt over the fallen Pope, blood on his hands and a sort of madness in his face. The silver dagger lay on the red carpet.

The second and third cameras were not much better. The right side of the stage stayed focused on the main players, but Konstantin’s momentum as he came into the shot and the way he twisted his body, trying to get between the white-robed Pope and the assassin, only served to obscure the actual moment of murder. The initial angle wasn’t wide enough to show the Swiss Guard drawing the Judas dagger moments before. The view from the left side was worse, focused as it was on the backs of the Pope and the guard and the light of anger-desperation-madness in Konstantin’s face as he threw himself at the pair.

No matter how many times he studied the images, he couldn’t find a single frame of the dagger before it was punched into the Pontiff’s neck.

But of course these weren’t the only cameras trained on the stage. Someone down there in that crowd had caught the truth on a cell phone or digital camera. Unfortunately there was no way of knowing who. If there were three thousand people packed into the square, perhaps three percent of them didn’t turn and follow the sound of the gunshot or the resulting flurry of movement from the trees for whatever reason. Three percent meant ninety people. Of those ninety, it was safe to assume fifty percent were too far back or had partially obscured views of the stage for one reason or another, which meant forty-five people were not looking the wrong way and had a clear view of the stage. Of those forty-five, there would be a split between left and right side of the stage. It was statistically unlikely to be a fifty percent split. It just didn’t work that way, but even if it was, then twenty-three and a half people were on the right side to see the dagger drawn.

Then it came down to wandering attention. How would people react? You hear a gunshot. Do you look immediately to the man in the center of the stage, fearing the worst? You bet your bottom dollar you do. Fifteen of those twenty-three and a half are going to look straight at the Pope as the gunshot reverberates through the square. That leaves eight and a half people who will be looking elsewhere, but in the right direction from the right side of the stage where they could conceivably see the blade going in, or at least see it in the murderer’s hand before it went in. Of those eight and a half, how many would be drawn by the sudden movement of Konstantin erupting from the crowd, looking away from the real murderer at the last second? Two? Three? Four? Five was reasonable. Five was a good number—meaning that three and a half people would be looking the right way, with the right view and undistracted.

Then the question was, of those, how many would realize that what they were seeing was the actual assassination in progress? One, maybe, two. Would they come forward? Why would they when the entire world had already convicted Konstantin? After all it was there in far too many megapixels. So what good would one uncorroborated testimony that contradicted all the perceived evidence be?

Less than useless was the answer, and Lethe knew it, unless that one person had also been filming the blessing with his cell phone or digital camera and happened to catch the truth in megapixels.

Lethe wasn’t a gambling man, but even he knew these weren’t the kind of odds you wanted to stake your life on.

That was what Konstantin was up against, and all the favors in the world wouldn’t change the evidence of two thousand eyes without something concrete.

So Lethe kept looking.

This time he blew up the image on the screen as large as it would go without pixilating too badly for him to make out the details and, instead of looking at the main players, turned his attention to the crowd, looking for that one cell phone or digital camera that might have actually recorded the truth. It was like looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack, but what else could he do?

Frost would be back soon. The ride back would probably take him two or three hours at most—closer to two given the hour and the relatively light traffic, and the way Frost flogged the Monster.

And he kept thinking about that third phone call Devere had made. The first to Geneva was obviously some routed warning to the dagger man; the second triggered the timer on the sniper rifle; but the third, back to the mother ship in London, made no sense.

Sir Charles, however
, did.

Even muffled nothing else sounds like a gunshot, not that a car would be backfiring this far out in the idyllic British countryside. The main road through to Ashmoor was far enough away that the sound wouldn’t travel over the hedges and moorland, through the forested strips of field and then through the thick stone walls of Nonesuch. No, the two shots, even suppressed by whatever silencer the assassin used, were distinct and distinctly out of place in the quiet of the manor.

The old man came out of his bed, struggling to bring his legs around so they reached the floor. The wheelchair was beside the bed, but getting to it was agony. He reached out, trying to claw at the frame and drag it closer, and as it butted up against the bed frame he struggled to stand. Every muscle in his arms shivered as he labored, shifting his weight forward onto legs that wouldn’t hold him. Then he twisted and came down hard, falling rather than sitting into the chair.

Sweat trickled down the side of the old man’s face.

He looked around the room. His walking stick was on the window side of the bed.

His service revolver, a 1963 Webley Break-Top Revolver—one of the very last commissioned for the armed forces—was in the desk drawer on the far side of the room, under lock and key. It was a fragile lock, but he was an old man. And from the chair it was doubtful he could get the leverage he needed to yank the drawer out, breaking the brass tongue of the lock or the wood around it. There was a box of ammo in the drawer as well. He had hoarded them after the pistol was retired in ’63. Two cartridges per man, per year, was the old joke. By the time the gun went out of service ammo for it was in short supply. The double-action revolver could pump out twenty to thirty rounds in a minute, more than the chamber could hold and more than the old man had. The box of ammunition contained twelve cartridges.

It was one or the oer. The panic button was beside the walking stick, the phone on the desk.

He held his hands out in front of his face. They were shaking, and not just from the exertion of getting into the chair. Even if he broke the drawer open, his hands were so unsteady there was no guarantee he could load the revolver without spilling the shells all over the floor. Then again, he would only need one shot.

It wasn’t much of a choice.

He made a decision.

He steered the wheelchair toward the desk. It bumped against the side of the bed and off the carved legs of the desk itself, rattling everything on the top. He pulled at the drawer, but it refused to budge. He pulled at it again, more desperately this time. The entire desk shook with the force of the movement, but still the drawer didn’t budge. He couldn’t get any better purchase on it, or exert any more pressure on any of the stress points.

He heard footsteps in the hall outside.

The old man pulled so hard on the drawer he nearly pulled the entire desk down on him. The lock held. He slammed his hand off it, spitting a curse, then stopped trying. He gripped the chair and tried to angle it back toward the window.

The door opened behind him.

He didn’t turn. He didn’t need to. He could see the intruder step into the room through the mirror above the desk. Wearing a black knitted balaclava with a ragged slash where the mouth had been cut out, and two narrow eye slits. Black curls slipped out from beneath the bottom of the balaclava. Even clothed head-to-toe in sexless black the woman’s well-defined curves gave her gender away.

Her left arm was considerably thicker than her right, misshapen. The old man realized it was sheathed in a light cast. He remembered Frost’s initial report from the house in Jesmond. This was the woman he had interrupted while she turned Sebastian Fisher’s apartment over. He had broken her arm in the struggle. And here she was breaking in again. The old man reached for the phone. He knew he couldn’t call, but knocking the handset out of the cradle would open a line, and an open line would blink on every telephone in the house. All he could do was hope that someone would see it. But who would see it? Max? Lethe? He had heard gunshots a moment before. She wouldn’t have just fired at an offending umbrella stand. Max would have gone to investigate the noise. Max. The old man couldn’t allow himself to regret or mourn. Max was dead or Max was alive; either way worrying about it now was pointless. He had his own sorry carcass to worry about/span>